Quite a few games on the gamecube and also on the wii, seem to use the same font for certain things (most commonly subtitles), these almost never upscale all that well in Dolphin regardless of the settings, you can see the jagged edges because the fonts (especially in regards to the gamecube itself) are of rather low quality.

I was wondering if there might be someway to improve the quality of this font, typically for games in dolphin we can just turn on dump textures and it'll dump all the game specific fonts, but theres a font or 2 that isn't dumped at all.

I noticed it whilst doing my Retexture pack for MGS TTS for Gamecube, the subtitle and item descriptions use the same font, which is of low quality, but it doesn't get dumped with all the others, but the text that shows up onscreen itself does get dumped (I can confirm from looking through the original game files that on the disc this isn't actually a texture and its probably dumped by dolphin as its done using a render to texture effect).

My first thought was to simply access the gamecube BIOS using my dumped bios, however regardless of what I press I can't get to the 'memory card selection' screen, it just shows the gamecube logo and then moves straight into the game (people say press A or X but it doesn't seem to matter), since that option doesn't seem viable, I'm wondering how I might go about this.

Since many games seem to use, what I assume to be, the consoles built in fonts for things such as memory card selection screens and the like I figured if this is possible it'd be useful to more or less everyone who uses dolphin.

If I remember a thread from a few weeks back correctly, then Dolphin contains a reverse engineered file to imitate a font dump from the actual consoles, which would imply there is a file containing fonts on the actual consoles somewhere. This would backup your theory that there're fonts which are used repeatedly in a variety of games and not kept locally on each game's disk. It might therefore be possible for the devs to do something about this, but I think you're going to need a more reliable source than me attempting to remember stuff and making assumptions based on it before it's worth putting in the feature request thread (which devs actually read).

OS: Windows 10 64 bit Professional
CPU: Intel i5 4670K @3.4GHz... for now @4.6GHz with a quick and dirty (yet stable) OC. May get faster in a bit before the end of time.
RAM: 16GB (Down from 24 GB after some was given to siblings)
GPU: Radeon Vega 56

AFAIK, the reverse engineered fonts that Dolphin includes is only for japanese games and you must check "Force console as NTSC-J" to use them. They are located at Sys\GC if I remember correctly...

Dan_Tsukasa Wrote:My first thought was to simply access the gamecube BIOS using my dumped bios, however regardless of what I press I can't get to the 'memory card selection' screen, it just shows the gamecube logo and then moves straight into the game (people say press A or X but it doesn't seem to matter), since that option doesn't seem viable, I'm wondering how I might go about this.

You should hold A button for some seconds. Just pressing it won't do anything. An easy way is enabling background input in Dolphin and start holding whatever button you assigned to A even before booting a game...

Fwiw, Dolphin has code to load up the non-japanese font into memory where a real GC would expect it. Whether this loading actually happens when running any NTSC-U (or PAL?) game in Dolphin, however, is not something I have checked out. The real, original fonts would be loaded into memory regardless when running the BIOS, afaik, on a GC or in Dolphin.

(12-03-2014, 09:12 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: If I remember a thread from a few weeks back correctly, then Dolphin contains a reverse engineered file to imitate a font dump from the actual consoles, which would imply there is a file containing fonts on the actual consoles somewhere. This would backup your theory that there're fonts which are used repeatedly in a variety of games and not kept locally on each game's disk. It might therefore be possible for the devs to do something about this, but I think you're going to need a more reliable source than me attempting to remember stuff and making assumptions based on it before it's worth putting in the feature request thread (which devs actually read).

I don't think its a theory honestly, the console 100% contains a font of some sort, otherwise there couldn't really be any text when it asks you which memory card you want to use.

(12-03-2014, 01:16 PM)Jhonn Wrote: AFAIK, the reverse engineered fonts that Dolphin includes is only for japanese games and you must check "Force console as NTSC-J" to use them. They are located at Sys\GC if I remember correctly...

Yeah I saw some fonts a .bin files, I was hoping they'd be a format that could be edited, I do see font_ansi.bin and font sjis.bin though.

(12-03-2014, 01:26 PM)Shonumi Wrote: Fwiw, Dolphin has code to load up the non-japanese font into memory where a real GC would expect it. Whether this loading actually happens when running any NTSC-U (or PAL?) game in Dolphin, however, is not something I have checked out. The real, original fonts would be loaded into memory regardless when running the BIOS, afaik, on a GC or in Dolphin.

I'm pretty sure games use them, though, if I delete the 2 font files from Dolphin, it doesn't stop text appearing in the games so perhaps the games use another font table and not those 2 that're used for BIOS stuff perhaps.

After a few tests I can confirm that the BIOS screen does use a font table, which gets dumped as a .png by dolphin, it uses it for the memory card screen and the options at the bottom.

If i replace this with a solid colour, the font is replaced by a box where it should have been, which is exactly as expected, however for games running, it changes nothing at all, so I'm still rather stumped as to where games are getting the font from.

(12-04-2014, 08:54 AM)tueidj Wrote: The system fonts are in those two files (font_ansi and font_sjis). They're intensity (luminance) textures with a bit of metadata attached, compressed using one of nintendo's custom formats.

Not every game will run fine without them, I think. JMC47 could probably confirm/deny that, since he's tested tons of games (more than humanly possible even).

The text used for subtitles in games like MGS:TTS may be different from the system fonts. The game might be using its own internal font, then using a render-to-texture effect. To get HD versions, you'd probably have to dump all of the text textures the game generates, then enhance them manually. I've encountered similar theoretical issues with HD text in some GBA games (they do the same thing, except the font is rendered as sprites). I can't say whether finding this font in the game would change anything, but if the game logic renders it at the same size regardless of the font, then I don't think it would be of much help.

(12-05-2014, 01:16 AM)Shonumi Wrote: Not every game will run fine without them, I think. JMC47 could probably confirm/deny that, since he's tested tons of games (more than humanly possible even).

The text used for subtitles in games like MGS:TTS may be different from the system fonts. The game might be using its own internal font, then using a render-to-texture effect. To get HD versions, you'd probably have to dump all of the text textures the game generates, then enhance them manually. I've encountered similar theoretical issues with HD text in some GBA games (they do the same thing, except the font is rendered as sprites). I can't say whether finding this font in the game would change anything, but if the game logic renders it at the same size regardless of the font, then I don't think it would be of much help.

Many of the fonts for the UI are as you say, basically just textures (a lot of them get dumped).

But for things like subtitles and codec, its just render to texture as you said, unfortunatly. Means if you wanted to HD those you'd have to dump a few thousand lines of text and upscale them all somehow in photoshop (you'd have to batch it, theres no other way to do it that wouldn't take forever).

Looking through the games files didn't bring me anything resembling a font file, nor a font folder. Looks like subtitles and Codec fonts are the only 2 things I can't redo in HD then I suppose, oh well, that sucks.